I predict that the US Supreme Court will get involved soon after they try censoring ANY website not known exclusively as a place where stuff gets pirated, and rip the culprits a new one. The American political climate doesn’t look NEARLY rotten enough to put up with this; all the lobbying for SOPA has simply been interacting with its most corrupt, out-of-touch part so far.
What does “soon after” mean for the USSC? Are we talking about a few months or a few years? Does a case need to go through a bunch of appeals from lower courts and spend many millions first?
ANY website not known exclusively as a place where stuff gets pirated
The government lawyers will be sure to tell the judge that’s exactly what the sites in questions are known as.
(Technically, stuff isn’t normally pirated at a site, unless it offers direct download links. And yet there are rulings even against Bittorrent trackers, which basically offer a non-searchable world-writeable hashmap. It’s 100% bullshit and politics—if there was any objective standard for “infringing websites”, Google.com would be heading the list. Instead we got a world where a judge is likely to think “P2P==piracy” instead of, say, “P2P==Internet”.)
What does “soon after” mean for the USSC? Are we talking about a few months or a few years? Does a case need to go through a bunch of appeals from lower courts and spend many millions first?
Short answer: Probably years and millions.
Under article three, section two of the Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court has “original jurisdiction” only in “Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party.” Mostly, they only decide cases that have already been through at least two levels of federal courts, and maybe some state courts before that.
Why do you assume that the Supreme Court will side with the pirates, and not with the hard-working media corporations ? The issue is currently being framed in these terms, after all.
Most likely because last time a takedown case went to them, they ruled that it was a violation of the First Amendment to take down some unrelated content (stuff on the same IP block if I recall) while shutting down a child pornography website. People hate pedophiles even more than media pirates, as a rule, so I’d guess they’d rule in favor of free speech here as well.
I predict that the US Supreme Court will get involved soon after they try censoring ANY website not known exclusively as a place where stuff gets pirated, and rip the culprits a new one. The American political climate doesn’t look NEARLY rotten enough to put up with this; all the lobbying for SOPA has simply been interacting with its most corrupt, out-of-touch part so far.
What does “soon after” mean for the USSC? Are we talking about a few months or a few years? Does a case need to go through a bunch of appeals from lower courts and spend many millions first?
The government lawyers will be sure to tell the judge that’s exactly what the sites in questions are known as.
(Technically, stuff isn’t normally pirated at a site, unless it offers direct download links. And yet there are rulings even against Bittorrent trackers, which basically offer a non-searchable world-writeable hashmap. It’s 100% bullshit and politics—if there was any objective standard for “infringing websites”, Google.com would be heading the list. Instead we got a world where a judge is likely to think “P2P==piracy” instead of, say, “P2P==Internet”.)
Short answer: Probably years and millions.
Under article three, section two of the Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court has “original jurisdiction” only in “Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party.” Mostly, they only decide cases that have already been through at least two levels of federal courts, and maybe some state courts before that.
Why do you assume that the Supreme Court will side with the pirates, and not with the hard-working media corporations ? The issue is currently being framed in these terms, after all.
Most likely because last time a takedown case went to them, they ruled that it was a violation of the First Amendment to take down some unrelated content (stuff on the same IP block if I recall) while shutting down a child pornography website. People hate pedophiles even more than media pirates, as a rule, so I’d guess they’d rule in favor of free speech here as well.
This. Also, a court is competitive, with evidence for both sides etc, while there’s no such thing as “counter-lobbying” in the Congress.